Theoretical and Applied Economics
No. 2 / 2013 (579)
The deideologizing of the market
The ideological efflorescence of the market concept is akin to the chemical process of the loss of crystallization, through which substance is turned to powder. The most obvious erosive aspect to the fine structure of the market is brought up by the doctrinary perspectives, which are interested in notion association through adjectivizations extracted from their own blood. In the most visible place is the insistence of the liberal activism of the spontaneous generation - which has propensities toward the extreme both in the economical and in the social planes - of attaching the manifest-concept of freedom to the market concept. In this vision the market has the epistemic city right only as a market-free, supposedly.
The existence of the market is proclaimed in the manner of an apriority. It does not justify itself through intermediaries and adjuvants of the preferred world, regardless of their ethically filtered characteristics. In anyway, the market belongs to the order of necessity, it is thus natural and therefore sufficient to its natural finality regardless of ideological context. Against any context, the market itself is either a natural means or it doesn't exist at all. The market does not have any degrees of existence, with any adjectivization altering its necessary functions, which spring from the human nature. There is at most a precarious understanding of the context, even though the pretence of ideologies is skilfully dissimulated into fortresses of correctitude and fulfilment.
The idea of free market, like any other ideological nomination - such as the socialist market - depletes the economical content out of a key cognitive operator of Economics. The market itself expresses the very nature of economicity, the essence of the space of economic rationality. It encompasses the multi-correlating functional and instrumental state of the primary behaviour of appropriation, in the transactional terms of utility and yield. The pre-eminence of the market given by its characteristic of being a mechanism of inter-individualities motivated by ontological values keeps it away from the need claim ideological values. The mix of referential planes initially hijacks the scientific discourse, to later dissolve it into the spectrum of political interests.
The term of "free market" comes from this area and reveals a preferential order regarding the sense, by altering the primary substrate and moving the accent on that which alters the essence. Economic conceptualization is replaced by political conceptualization. There is thus a departure from the empire of rationality, which focuses on wealth as the motivation for human action, and a step into the empire of politics, where the focus is on power, as the object of government.
The free market is the concept which transforms Power into a centripetal force, where Power managed freedoms and dissipates the basis of economicity, turning the economy into a means for producing political hegemony through Wealth. It's not just a simple reversal of positions, but a substitution of concepts justified by the simple nominal call to an ethical value, essential in the political order, but inherently unconnected to the natural, non-ethical state of a functional structure such as the market.
Out of all the consequences of epistemological inconformity, the most negatively complicated one is that the hybrid idea of "free market" contains the permissiveness to the norm, challenging the anthropic properties of the amniotic medium in which it exists. The reliance on the definiens and on the specific difference of the concepts of market and free-market leads to an epistemic turbulence which is fatal to rational understanding.
It is known that the substance of the space of economic rationality is defined in normative terms, as rules and inter-individual procedures of utility, through which the exchange is an answer to an objective necessity of a transactional essence tested by yield. Extending the sense of the market on the libertarian plane of understanding -attributed to freedom, the most relevant variable of the social condition - produces confusion, the orientation in the states of reality being depleted of rational sense. This takes place in its most unusual form, with freedom justifying the economically motivated human behaviours for choosing non-rational solutions or answers from outside the usual workings of the space of economic rationality, which are identified by the concept of the black market, attached to the idea of underground economy.
The lack of norms in configuring the sense of freedom naturally turns the underground economy into the prevalent phenomenology of the free market. It is not just a paradox of the ideological contamination of economicity through the libertarian exercise, but an awful abdication by the practitioners of this hypothesis from the parsimonious restraints of the rational knowledge towards which Economics aspires. We are witnessing the declassification of economic cognition into the patterns of pre-scientific thinking. We are being retro-projected into the universe of the Dark Ages, where the divine right had equalled the path of power with the control of wealth, with the economy as the direct expression of the feudal right for the appropriation of any means of added value.
Ethics is not characteristically friends with economicity. The balance of rights has always been manipulated by the blind Power in order to draw Wealth towards itself. Economics was exclusively Political. But the free marked brings back to life the same economic mechanism which is not interested in the norm, a mechanism which seemed to be invalidated by the Enlightenment's rationalism: the underground economy is the ideological consequence of the free market. Economic rationality becomes more fluid and the methods for producing added value become relative. In order to be called free, the market includes in its organism the selfish gene of politics, which pushes it towards mutations in its understanding of the relationship between means and ends.
Thus, Wealth as an end certifies the underground option and Power as a means translates rationality into libertarian terms, depleting it of sense. The purpose of utility gives Economics the right to operate with no other restraints other than those of yield. The economy, as well as its actional epicentre which is the market, both configured by either ethical or - worse - ideological values, generates conceptual anomalies and perverted behaviours. The theorisation of the free market and the theory of free commerce belong in the same class, in which development is defined in terms of relative advantages, whose realisation, though, always takes the form of the imbalance of comfort between the metropolis and the periphery.
The free market is a vision which gives rise to fictitious specific correlations in a space of rationality. This space, which implies inter-subjectivity, does not accept the arbitrary. Freedom in the economy only has a sense when the correlations and inherent symmetries in the contributions of factors and agents are being respected. In a peculiar way the market is not free in the way politics understands this value. The market is simply a market not because it is free of norms, but because it remains a trans-personal means, potentially free to be used to achieve utility. To say "free market" is equivalent to perverting the primary content of the concept of economicity.
The free market is an alchemical mixture of referential planes, which formally gave rise to an ideology-rekindling pleonasm.
Contents
- Has accession to the EU
affected business cycles?
Panagiotis EVANGELOPOULOS
Dimitrios DAPONTAS
- The effect of the Romanian pension market
concentration on the magnitude of pension revenues
Vasile ROBU
Irina Daniela CIŞMAŞU
Maria Iuliana SANDU
- Interest rate channel in Romania: assessing
the effectiveness transmission of monetary policy
impulses to inflation and economic growth
Vasile COCRIŞ
Anca Elena NUCU
- Romania's road to Euro zone.
From structural balance to structural balance
corrected for absorption
Aura-Gabriela SOCOL
- ARDL investment model of Tunisia
Abdulbaset M. HAMUDA
Veronika ŠULIKOVÁ
Vladimír GAZDA
Denis HORVÁTH
- A review of the economic crisis:
solutions and failures in the European Union
Marius-Cristian PANĂ
- Macroprudential policy and financial stability
Bogdan CHIRIACESCU
- Public policies targeting labour market rigidities
Andreea Claudia ŞERBAN
- National policy measures.
Right approach to foreign direct investment flows
Cătălin-Emilian HUIDUMAC-PETRESCU
Radu Marcel JOIA
- Influence of the prudential supervision
over the capitalization
of the Romanian insurance market
Laura Elly NAGHI
- Conceptual aspects regarding balneotherapy tourism
marketing in Romania
Aurelia-Felicia STĂNCIOIU
Codruța-Adina BĂLTESCU
Andreea BOTOȘ
Ion PÂRGARU
- East-European stock exchanges
in the context of financial crisis
Cătălina Claudia SAVA